The silence rages at the walls as,
In the bowels of the science building,
Thirty sweating, stifled faces stare
Through the glass of flat-bottomed flasks
To witness annihilation: acid and base
Finding a measure of peace, as it were.
In measuring and pouring caustic hell
How bile overflows in a rush to quench
The rising roil of acid in your gut,
They replicate results nature produces
Largely by accident, and so do they.
Later they'll forge their reports
With Vulcan's own creative gleam,
But here, it's patient swirling,
Steady hands, and holding breath -
Excited, maybe tired, maybe terrified.

It seems so innocuous the first few times,
An innocence and an unknowing. It's fine.
"But, I mean, where is your FAMILY from?"
Sure. And I'll explain: that is complicated.

My patience wears out pretty fast nowadays
So I try to bite back all the bitterness
When faced with the expectant empathy
A vivisectionist might spare the dead.
So I dissect myself with a practiced ease:

My mother came from Guyana, a bounty land
She fled so long ago. I never ask her why.
My father wasn't much of one. We don't talk.
Me? I'm from the most hated place on this Earth:
New Jersey. They always seem to expect that.

A simple answer for a simple question,
And I know they only asked because they meant
"How come you don't look like me, so tall and dark?"
And I'd smile if they were honest about it.

Splayed out atop the the table, stupefied,
Etherized, dreaming anything but excision,
Witness the specimen's unnatural habitat.
Life stains the whole of its existence -
See the sacrament of its entirety, its divinity,
Its flesh made manifest and merely flesh.
It mocks this menagerie with every breath
And, aping its peers, struggles, strives, dies
For the pittance this world lends it.
Confronted with the end, it spits derision.
Confronted with the start, it cries in awe!
What a nonsense of a creature we see here,
This enigma we recognize in ourselves:
The human, being.

The music box grinds down to silent rest
Between a crone’s rheumatic, weathered hands.
A simple enough trinket, she'd attest,
But quick enough to answer her demands:
Her brittle fingers wait for it to cease,
Then seek the winding key, its battered brass
All lacquered in patina, thumbprint grease
And dusting left undone, its fragile glass
A testament to things left well alone,
A dancer wrought in crystal finery
Awaiting his accompaniment’s tone,
His patient poise the winder’s reverie...
Returned, rewound, to tabletop in time,
The music box begins, again, to chime.

All we want to hear about is love and
               Madness, wounds left in the mind
                              Where what's taken for granted
Was ripped out and scattered, just ash.
               Maybe just madness, then. Addicts
                              Left shaking their cupped hands
Trembling out aching, quaking desire
               Where stillness arrives with a kiss,
                              Where confession pours crimson,
A ****** of claret. Spilled into a glass,
               Sloshed across a tongue, breathing
                              Bitter, barren, dry - washed down
With another glass, until the flavor stains
               Teeth and tongue and lips. We are
                              What we drink: water and blood.
We are what we love: madness, confession.
               Does a ****** see in their subjects
                              The viscid revel of their own scars?

Another night staring skyward where
          Every creaking shift fills the world
                    And the ink-black sky's toothless maw,
Shocks and aftershocks of sound
          Where a moment's discomfort swells
                    To a frenzied crescendo, incessant,
Pressing against skin from within
          Until a saint's patience would break
                    Like lips parting for a stifled sigh.
Midnight falters and fades to dawn,
          Surrenders to the unconquered sun
                    Who, grinning wide as the horizon,
Watches the twisting, turning world
          Tear away from night's dreamless womb
                    Sleepless, stumbling away in a daze.

Wherever grass grows wild and tall
I'll think of you beneath it all,
A secret shared with earth and sky
And no one else.

Where winter came to freeze a heart,
That summer thawed us both apart
And somewhere in that hazy heat
I laid you down.

There's funerary flowers there,
Run wild and overgrown with care.
I think I'll take that wilderness
Before your chains.

A shackled love, a fettered life?
A rarer smile, brittle with strife?
All that, I'll leave behind with you
And go alone.